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A Simple Swab Can Make You a Lifesaver

The cure for someone else’s terrible illness could start with a swab rubbed in the cheek of a stranger. Here’s a Someone Else: Sophia Lopez, now 6 months old, of the Bronx. When she was 10 weeks old, she came down with a fever of 104. Her parents ran her to the emergency room at Mount Sinai Hospital and learned that she had a rare blood disease with a long biochemical name and the initials HLH. It is a catastrophe rolling downhill.

Sophia joined a crowd of babies, children, men and women with illnesses like HLH and leukemia and blood cancers who need new bone marrow. They can get the marrow from anyone, family member or stranger, who has similar traits.

To begin with, this requires a swab from the inner cheek, which is used to identify possible donors and stored in a bone marrow registry.

On Saturday, a donor drive run by DKMS Americas will be held from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Public School 71, 3040 Roberts Avenue, in the Pelham Bay neighborhood of the Bronx. People who can’t go in person to the drive can register online, at www.getswabbed.com.

“We’re trying to reach out to everyone to participate, but we’re especially trying to reach out to our Hispanic community, because we make up only 10 percent of the bone marrow registry,” said Denise Lopez, Sophia’s mother. Her daughter is of Puerto Rican and Ecuadorean descent. Sophia has two brothers, 2 and 11, who dote on her, but no one in the family is a match for her.

About a year ago, another bone marrow drive was held in Lower Manhattan. One of the people who signed up was Carlos Segura, the father of twins. The registration was a painless process that involved filling out forms and having a quick swab of the cheek with cotton on a stick. “All the parents in the area went,” Mr. Segura said. “Six months later, I got a call that I was a match for someone with a blood cancer. All they told me was that it was a 4-year-old boy.”

The method of extracting marrow has improved considerably from when a long needle was stuck into a bone. Now, a donor can take medicine for five days, which makes the blood richer with the most valuable cells. These are harvested with little pain.

Photo

Sophia Lopez, 6 months old, needs a bone marrow transplant.Credit
Robert Caplin for The New York Times

“You go into a hospital and they take the blood out of one arm, run it through a machine that takes out the cells, and then puts it back in the other arm,” Mr. Segura said.

Born in Colombia, Mr. Segura moved to New York 20 years ago. He was puzzled by the shortfall of Latinos in the registry. (African-Americans are also underrepresented.)

“I think there’s not that much information about this, and you really don’t hear about it,” Mr. Segura said. “My mom never heard about it. Some people think it’s painful, but it’s much better with the medicine they use now to get the cells. They make it easy.”

Ms. Lopez thought that fear might also be a factor. “Maybe because they’re filling out a form, they worry about it’s something for immigration, or maybe it’s the lack of knowledge about what is it that it entails,” she said. “A lot of people are afraid. It’s just a simple swab test.”

Millions of people donate blood every year, but very few are asked to have their mouths swabbed to see if they might match someone in need of bone marrow. Blood is a far more valuable economic commodity than marrow because it can be separated into parts and used even without perfect matches between donor and recipients.

Another very promising source of fresh cells for sick people is also squandered. The blood taken from the umbilical cords of newborn children is rejected less often than adult cells, but only a fraction of the supply is preserved. Millions of umbilical cords are simply disposed every year as medical waste.

Even in a hospital crib, Sophia Lopez is still kicking and full of babbling fun, her mother reports. “She’s talking today to the nurses she recognizes and smiling at them,” her mother, Denise Lopez, said on Tuesday. “And to my sister.”

Carlos Segura said he would not hesitate to donate again. “I have two kids, and God forbid, you go through that,” he said. “Whatever little discomfort I went through was nothing compared to what the parents and the kid are going through.”

E-mail: dwyer@nytimes.com

A version of this article appears in print on May 19, 2010, on page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: A Simple Swab Can Make You A Lifesaver. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe